Magnitude representation in sequential comparison

Authors: Korbinian Moeller Elise Klein HansChristoph Nuerk Klaus Willmes

Publish Date: 2013/01/24

Volume: 14, Issue: 1, Pages: 51-62

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Abstract

There is accumulating evidence suggesting that twodigit number magnitude is represented in a decomposed fashion into tens and units rather than holistically as one integrated entity However recently it has been claimed that this property does not hold for the case when two tobecompared numbers are presented sequentially In the present study we pursued this issue in two experiments by evaluating perceptual as well as strategic aspects arising for sequential stimulus presentation in a magnitude comparison task We observed reliable unitdecade compatibility effects indicating decomposed processing of tens and units in a magnitude comparison task with sequential presentation of the tobecompared numbers In particular we found that both confounding lowlevel perceptual features and stimulus set characteristics determining cue validity of the units influenced the compatibility effect Taken together our results clearly indicate that decomposed representations of tens and units seem to be a general characteristic of multidigit number magnitude processing rather than an exception occurring under very specific conditions only Implications of these results for the understanding of number magnitude representations are discussedThis research was funded in part by the German Research Foundation DFG for project 2 within the Research Group Forschergruppe Analyse und Förderung effektiver LehrLernProzesse FOR 738/2/ granted to Ulrike Cress and HansChristoph Nuerk supporting Korbinian Moeller Additionally part of this research was supported by a project in the ScienceCampus WissenschaftsCampus Tuebingen Cluster 1/TP 1 We are grateful to Ian Mackenzie for language editing

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